For four years, a cast-iron spire made Rouen Cathedral the world's tallest building
Rouen Cathedral took more than eight centuries to build and rebuild, and its three towers each wear a different style. Vikings raided it, Rollo was baptised in it, Monet painted it over and over, and between 1876 and 1880 its controversial iron spire outreached every other structure on Earth.
Christianity reached Rouen around 260 with its first bishop, Saint Mellonius, and a three-naved basilica stood on the site by 395. Charlemagne visited in 769, but Viking raids from 841 badly damaged the complex. In a striking reversal, the Viking leader Rollo, who became the first Duke of Normandy, was baptised in the cathedral in 915 and buried there in 933. A Romanesque rebuild was consecrated in 1063 with Duke William present, three years before he conquered England.
Gothic arrived after Archbishop Hugues of Amiens saw the new basilica at Saint-Denis consecrated and began a tower in the fresh style in 1145. His successor, Gautier the Magnificent, tore down the old nave in 1185, only for a fire on Easter eve in 1200 to ravage the town and the half-built church. Work resumed fast enough for King Philip II to celebrate the annexation of Normandy there in 1204. Around 1500 Cardinal Georges d'Amboise blended Renaissance touches into the Gothic fabric and had the tilting west front rebuilt in lacy Flamboyant stone crowded with carved figures.
Disasters kept coming. Calvinists wrecked tombs and windows in 1562, lightning struck repeatedly, and revolutionaries in 1796 turned the building into a Temple of Reason and melted its railings for cannon. When lightning destroyed the central spire in 1822, the architect Jean-Antoine Alavoine proposed cast iron instead. Gustave Flaubert mocked it as a delirious metalworker's dream, but the 151-metre spire rose anyway, finished in 1882, and briefly held the height record until Cologne Cathedral overtook it.
In the weeks before D-Day in 1944, British and then American bombs struck the cathedral, the second raid setting the Saint-Romain tower ablaze. Restoration reopened it in 1956, yet scaffolding lingered on parts of it for half a century until 2016. A storm in 1999 hurled a 26-ton turret into the choir, and in July 2024 the spire caught fire during renovation before firefighters contained it the same day.
Source: Rouen Cathedral
